


in which tyler manages the denny's tumblr account

by cheese (youreanoodlemrbarrow)



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: High School AU, M/M, dennys au, i mean tyler is a bit older but, its really stupid and im sorry???, they boys have a tumblr, this is what it sounds like, yeah - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 07:18:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5155121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youreanoodlemrbarrow/pseuds/cheese
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyler is an intern, he has to deal with Denny's tumblr blog.<br/>Josh is a memeologist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. memeology 101

Tyler hated his job. Well, no, this is inaccurate for two reasons:  
a) this was an internship, it’s not like he was getting paid or anything  
b) he actually loved it

Okay, to rephrase it, people thought Tyler hated his job, and they had this impression because this is what he led them to believe.  
They- well, nobody could know that Tyler was the mind behind Denny’s accounts on social media. It was a Big Secret, and it was made very clear the very moment he had to sign his contract.

He was cool with it, actually, because he had been trying hard for years to build a cool façade and not let his friends know he was actually, deep inside, a giant dork.

 

Josh Dun, what can be said of Josh Dun.  
Lots of things can be said of Josh Dun, actually, but the main one is that he was a nerd: he knew it, his schoolmates knew it, it was just how things were.

He liked aliens, and cats, and memes, and memes with cats dressed up as aliens.

He didn’t really have friends at school, but he did not care that much because at the end of the summer he was going to begin the last year there and well, he could deal with being a little bit lonely, especially because he wasn’t really lonely… he did have pals, lots of them too, he had just never met them in real life. Yet.

 

It was 2 am.  
School was starting in a week, but Josh wasn’t going to try and get into a regular sleeping pattern just yet. He was scrolling through his dashboard when a post popped up, one of those tumblr-sponsored posts everyone would happily do without.

He had nothing to lose though, and his time was not really valuable, so he glanced over it and w o a h denny’s had a blog? And Josh didn’t know?   
He couldn’t believe that. He felt betrayed. His favourtite fast food chain was active in social networks and MAN they were… who the HELL was behind that blog?

It was… heaven. Meme-y heaven. It was just so trashy and the humour was so up Josh’s alley he couldn’t suppress a giggle from leaving his lips.

He was a man with a mission now. He had to find out who the genius mastermind behind Denny’s blog was, it was just the thing to get over his end-of-summer-break blues.

 

Tyler sat to his computer in the cramped office where he worked. He hummed, turning it on, and opened his browser. Tumblr. Let’s get started.  
He always began his day by checking out the ask box, because as much as he loved pulling memes out of his ass, giving snarky answers to strangers was the best possible way to spend time on the internet.

“If you don’t follow me, I’m never eating at Denny’s again”, he read. He thought about an appropriate response for something like a millisecond, and then he smirked, his fingers flying on the keyboard. “pressuring us into this relationship is probably not the best way to start out”, he deadpanned, keeping things lowercase and casual.

No more fun asks to answer to, though, so he turned his attention to writing the most awful text post he could think of. He bit the inside of his cheek and stared out of the window, looking for inspiration.

 

“What the fresh hell is this?”, were the first words that left Josh’s mouth that very same morning. 

Well, it was noon, but time was an illusion anyway. He had just woken up, so it was morning, and if anyone had something in contrary they could fight him.

The text post, the first text post of his day, said “*tips waitress* m’bacon”.

Josh was appalled. How dare Denny’s make him read that with his own two eyes? He needed to know more.

“who the hell runs this blog?” he demanded, reblogging the offensive content and shaking his head.

He got up, grabbed his phone and walked to the kitchen, leaning against the counter waiting for coffee to brew. He shrugged and kept scrolling, occasionally liking and posting stuff that made him laugh.  
Yeah, he did laugh out loud at various posts, but whatever, it was not like he was being judged or something.

Another Denny’s post? He could not believe.   
“#i cannot believe”, he tagged it, because honestly it was just a stupid doodle of a distressed face captioned “me when I skip breakfast”.  
“Relatable,” he whispered to himself.

 

Tyler came back to his computer after the lunch break, only to find a spike in activity that was apparently 90% imputable to tumblr user spacejishwa.  
He had nothing better to do, he wasn’t supposed to be posting stuff every five seconds, so he thought he could spare a minute checking out that blog.

Maybe two minutes.

Ten minutes later, Tyler was wiping tears out of his eyes because spacejishwa was… well, he was hilarious.   
Not only he had gotten increasingly upset about Denny’s (Tyler’s) awful sense of humour, but he had this super weird thing for photoshopping kittens in pictures of galaxies? Unbelievable.

Tyler was starting to feel guilty for not having posted a meme in like an hour, so he went for it before he could do something creepy like trying to find spacejishwa’s selfie tag.  
He was a restaurant, after all.

He spent a few minutes photoshopping a pancake into the milky way, and uploaded it.  
Who knew if the person he took inspiration from was going to noti-

Yeah, he had noticed. “#should i be flattered #wow dennys #i mean” was the set of tags under which his creation was filed in spacejishwa’s blog.

Tyler smiled, and browsed the dennys tag because why not, he couldn’t spend the whole day stalking a random person.

“Will dennys madness ever end” earned a dry “we know exactly what we’re doing” from Tyler, who did not infact know anything about what he was doing, but did the internet really need to know?

A couple memes later, Tyler was bored.  
He hated being bored

 

Josh was screaming on the inside. Josh was also screaming on the outside, but quietly.  
What the fuck, dennys had liked one of his pictures? 

 

Tyler was screaming on the inside. Tyler was not screaming on the outside, for once, he reserved the screaming for when he was playing the ukulele.  
He clicked on the heart icon again, and it turned back to being gray. Maybe spacejishwa hadn’t noticed his slip-up.

(spacejishwa was pretty in an alien kind of way, but Tyler was a restaurant chain and not some twenty year old person with a slight obsession)

 

Days passed, and Tyler would have been kidding himself if he hadn’t admitted that a good percentage of what he posted went up because he thought the alien boy was going to appreciate it.  
Well, not really. He didn’t /think/ his work was appreciated, he /knew/ it. 

The other boy (was he a boy? Tyler didn’t know. He did look like a boy and he used he/his pronouns but it meant nothing) reblogged everything, and made jokes Tyler always responded to.

“r u single?,” said an anonymous ask.  
Tyler did not know what to say, but as soon as he remembered he was working the answer became clear “we are a restaurant,” he typed, and hit ‘post’.

 

School began. The first day was okay, Josh thought, it always was.  
But thing is, after the first day there are a whole bunch of days that are not okay. 

This was only the third one, and he was already skipping class by locking himself in a bathroom stall to have a cry and maybe calm down a little. He could survive the last year of school, he had to, but it was hard.

It was hard to get through the day when people constantly mocked him for his appearance and… everything else.   
Being a genderfluid gay boy in a small Ohio high school was not easy, but Josh was strong.

Yeah, he cried a lot, so what. He was just sensitive. 

Alright, maybe he did mind not having friends in school but whatever, he was nice to everyone and if they didn’t want to be friends with him he wasn’t going to beg them.

He pulled his phone out, he really needed someone to reassure him, and who else to turn to if not dennys?  
Stupid idea? Probably. Was that going to stop him? Nah son.

“hey dennys, look, i know this is stupid but i am really lonely and i hate this school and this school kinda hates me back (i don’t really know who started) and ive been crying for the last two periods and yeah. post some memes to cheer me up?”

 

Tyler read the message and thought about what to do. He didn’t know much about spacejishwa, but he suspected that he knew more about him than his parents did.  
The alien kid had serious oversharing issues, but Tyler was not going to complain.

He quickly photoshopped a spaceship landing on a stack of pancakes, posted it, then immediately decided to do something he was probably not supposed to do.  
He answered the ask privately.

“hey there, im sorry to hear that. are you ok? do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”. He hit send.

 

Josh was… Josh had smiled at the horrible alien-on-pancakes edit thing, but this was really unexpected. Okay. He could totally do this.  
He just needed to find his chill.

“okay. wow dennys, that’s some excellent customer service. i mean, i study in this tiny ohio high school, i have missed an year because stuff, and i have no friends. but don’t worry about me.”

“i shouldn’t be doing this, but would you rather do this over text?”, came the reply.

Honestly, what the hell? Josh wasn’t going to turn the supreme meme mastermind down. He sent his number.

While waiting for the restaurant chain (or -more likely- the person behind it) to contact him, he left the stall, splashed some cold water on his face and snuck to the library, finding a quiet corner in which he could text safely.

 

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
i am shame im sorry


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They keep texting and they're two fuckin nerds but no wonder.

“oh shoot, my tangerine lantern has stopped working”  
“your what?”  
It was… oh man, it was 1 am. Not particularly surprising, but both Josh (that was spacejishwa’s name, or so he claimed) and Tyler had to wake up early in the morning, and school and meme-ing required energy.  
But then again, they had been texting for a week and saying goodnight was becoming increasingly hard.  
“do you not know what a tangerine is, dennys?”  
“i do know what a tangerine is, thats precisely why im perplexed”

 

Tyler woke up with his phone on his face; he woke up because the phone on his face buzzed with an incoming text.  
“good morning dennys, check out my tumblr when you can ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ”  
He smiled, and searched google for an appropriate emoji  
“im on it (′ʘ⌄ʘ‵)”, he sent.  
It turned out to be an appropriate choice, actually, because by the end of the four-minute video Tyler had that exact expression painted on his features.  
He had clicked the play button without knowing what to expect, but he couldn’t say –in hindsight- he was completely surprised: the alien boy had apparently spent a good chunk of the night making a video tutorial about how to make tangerine candles, something entirely too pinterest-y to be taken seriously.  
Josh seemed to take everything seriously, Tyler pondered. Except things that were actually serious; those he would shrug off with a “nvm”, and the older boy didn’t feel like pushing him to share intimate secrets or whatever.

 

Tyler had a problem. Tyler had lots of problems, but the most recent one was that he just couldn’t stop thinking about some blue-haired nerd he met on tumblr.  
It wasn’t that the boy was cute. Yeah, he was cute indeed, but he was mostly just so interesting; he made Tyler feel alive, and he liked it. He hadn’t felt this way since… had he ever felt this way?  
This problem had a few sub-problems of its own, namely that Josh didn’t know who he had been texting for a week. As far as he knew, he could have been texting a t-rex (except those didn’t exist anymore, had too little fingers and arms too short), and that means he couldn’t possibly have been developing feelings for… a diner chain.   
People didn’t do that, fall for restaurants.  
Not even weird people.

 

Josh was in trouble.  
Not like trouble-trouble, more like emotional trouble.  
Josh had a crush on a restaurant chain, and he was not going to admit it, ever.  
“looks like im developing a crush for some diner or the other ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)”, he posted.  
Alright, so what, some thoughts are so private you can only share them with your therapist (who wasn’t going to hear any of this) and the whole of the internet, and this is exactly one of those.  
He tagged it #i lowkey hope meme overlord sees this, and posted it.  
He felt like an ass, but he always felt like an ass, so it was almost not an issue anymore.  
Josh decided it was time to get dressed and do something useful with his life, so he rolled off his bed and padded to the wardrobe. He picked a long skirt with a cat print, and he paired it with a p!atd shirt because life was too short not to freak people out with your attire.  
He walked the short way to school, and snuck to his seat just in time.   
As the teacher started explaining some chemistry concept or the other (it could even have been physics, for what Josh cared), the boy pulled out his phone and snapped a quick picture of his pouty face.  
He sent it to “His Memeness”, captioning it with a whiny “y u no tell me what u think of the lanterns???”, and began drawing stupid creatures instead of notes.

 

Tyler hadn’t answered for a very simple reason: he was late, and he couldn’t text Josh without giving him his full attention, he felt like it wasn’t fair or something.  
So when he settled at his desk and took a sip of his hot cocoa (he didn’t like coffee, and he was ready to fight anyone who said anything about it), he unlocked his phone and found himself face to face with a pouty alien.  
He smiled widely, and tapped out an apology, hoping Josh wasn’t really offended.   
He was pretty sure he wasn’t, but reading people was not Tyler’strongest suit.

 

The day had been pretty long, but the afternoon eventually arrived. Josh slung his kitten-print backpack over his shoulder, and decided to begin the weekend the best possible way: eating pancakes.  
He headed to the Denny’s that stood two blocks away from school, and took a picture of the sign over the entrance. He sat in a booth alone, ordered a stack of pancakes and posted the photo on tumblr, feeling like an absolute dork.  
His food arrived at the same time as a text from His Memesty (was dennys even a boy or a girl or neither or both or what? Josh had no idea, nor he cared), which Josh opened immediately.  
“ur in me now”  
Josh didn’t know how to respond to that.

 

“i dont know how to respond to that,” Tyler read. Fuck. Did he just… shit. He laid his head on this desk, and sighed.  
He had to fuck up sooner or later, right?  
The phone buzzed, startling him. He was a bit scared of checking the latest text but he figured he should just get it over with.  
“( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)”  
Tyler was in love with a meme.


End file.
